Brian Noble

Associate Professor


Email: bnoble@dal.ca
Phone: 902-494-2819
Mailing Address: 
Room 3118, McCain Building, 6135 University Avenue
PO Box 15000, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4R2
 
Research Topics:
  • Social justice and inequality
  • Applied - action research
  • Decolonizing studies and methodologies
  • Indigenous peoples
  • Knowledge, science and expertise
  • Political anthropology
  • Property and law
  • Settler states

Cross appointments

  • International Development Studies
  • Canadian Studies

Education

  • BA, MA, PhD, University of Alberta
  • PDF, University of British Columbia

Research interests

Brian Noble is a social anthropologist currently active in two research areas.  One addresses anti-colonial resolution of relations between Indigenous Peoples and settler Canada, and the processes animating indigenous land, economic and knowledge authority in global arenas. Noble, and his graduate students, have collaborated with Piikani, Secwepemc, Kwakwka'awakw, Mi'kmaq, and Cree peoples. He is also Co-investigator on the SSHRC-MCRI Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, Policy, Ethics.

Noble’s second area is the anthropology of science, techniques and expertise. His 2016 book Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology  investigates how expert scientific and public practices intersect in constituting dinosaur natures. He is also Dalhousie’s partner in a multi-university American Philosophical Society project on the natural / human science contributions of fore-runner anthropologist Franz Boas; co-manager of the Atlantic node of the Situating Science Knowledge Cluster; and co-investigator in the CIHR-funded project Constituting Commercialization. He has organized symposia including “To See Where it Takes us:  Conversations with Isabelle Stengers” (Cosmopolitics Lecture) and “Reconciliation:  The Responsibility for Shared Futures” (M Asch “Confederation Treaties”,  J Borrows “Aki-noomagewin”).

Selected publications, presentations and reports