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How does the digitisation of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and waters. In this context, laden with environmental risks and resurgent anti‐colonial politics, state actors are implicating smart oceans governance in efforts to harmonise capitalist growth with sustainability mandates and the 'recognition' of Indigenous self‐determination. Our analysis draws on environmental state theory, critical indigenous studies, and human geographies of the ocean, to analyse interviews, Access to Information requests, scientific studies, and policy reports. Our findings suggest that smart oceans governance poses novel risks to Indigenous peoples and their distinctive 'seascape epistemologies'. At the same time, we observe in this medium new limits to the state's ability to consolidate settler colonial authority and extend possessive colonial entitlements to Indigenous lands and waters. First Nations are also engaging with smart oceans governance in ways that assert 'Indigenous data sovereignty', help chart their own political and territorial ambitions, and carve out meaningful spaces of Indigenous marine stewardship. A comprehensive overview of the politics of smart oceans ‐ that is, ensembles of data intensive sensing tools and associated marine governance practices. The paper draws examples from the west coast of Canada where it finds new risks to First Nations governance but also moments where smart oceans governance is being leveraged by communities to support their political goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical processes that transformed tar sands bitumen in the Athabasca river basin into a natural resource of Canada. The discourse of the resource was first applied to bitumen during the second half of the nineteenth century as the settler colonial state dispatched geologists into the region to quantify, calculate, and measure its properties, and to speculate upon its potential economic applications. The re-storying of bitumen as a natural resource fostered a sense of resource nationalism among citizens of this newly formed state, who projected their fantasies of a settler colonial future upon the stored potentialities that the resource offered. In turn, this desire to secure resources on behalf of the Canadian nation served to consolidate the state's incursion into the Athabasca, enabling the spatial reorganization of the region in accordance with the settler resource imaginary. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I suggest that we can think about this relationship between settler colonialism and the resource as a "resource desiring machine," where both the subject and the object of desire are co-produced through the relationship of desire itself. Moreover, I argue that this can help us to rethink the relationship between resources and violence. Rather than asking how and when resources cause violence, I argue that violence is inherent to the very category of resource. Violence is the constitutive moment of resource-making, and sustaining the resource imaginary relies on the ongoing violence (threatened or actual) of political and economic institutions such as private property and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mitochondrial Complex IV [cytochrome c oxidase (COX)] deficiency is one of the most common respiratory chain defects in humans. The clinical phenotypes associated with COX deficiency include liver disease, cardiomyopathy and Leigh syndrome, a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by bilateral high signal lesions in the brainstem and basal ganglia. COX deficiency can result from mutations affecting many different mitochondrial proteins. The French-Canadian variant of COX-deficient Leigh syndrome is unique to the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Québec and is caused by a founder mutation in the LRPPRC gene. This encodes the leucine-rich pentatricopeptide repeat domain protein (LRPPRC), which is involved in post-transcriptional regulation of mitochondrial gene expression. Here, we present the clinical and molecular characterization of novel, recessive LRPPRC gene mutations, identified using whole exome and candidate gene sequencing. The 10 patients come from seven unrelated families of UK-Caucasian, UK-Pakistani, UK-Indian, Turkish and Iraqi origin. They resemble the French-Canadian Leigh syndrome patients in having intermittent severe lactic acidosis and early-onset neurodevelopmental problems with episodes of deterioration. In addition, many of our patients have had neonatal cardiomyopathy or congenital malformations, most commonly affecting the heart and the brain. All patients who were tested had isolated COX deficiency in skeletal muscle. Functional characterization of patients' fibroblasts and skeletal muscle homogenates showed decreased levels of mutant LRPPRC protein and impaired Complex IV enzyme activity, associated with abnormal COX assembly and reduced steady-state levels of numerous oxidative phosphorylation subunits. We also identified a Complex I assembly defect in skeletal muscle, indicating different roles for LRPPRC in post-transcriptional regulation of mitochondrial mRNAs between tissues. Patient fibroblasts showed decreased steady-state levels of mitochondrial mRNAs, although the length of poly(A) tails of mitochondrial transcripts were unaffected. Our study identifies LRPPRC as an important disease-causing gene in an early-onset, multisystem and neurological mitochondrial disease, which should be considered as a cause of COX deficiency even in patients originating outside of the French-Canadian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]