Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics

L05 - Workshop: Refusals, Resistances, Resurgences I

Date: May 30 | Time: 01:30pm to 03:00pm | Location: Classroom - CL 418 Room ID:15752

Chair/Président/Présidente : Kiera Ladner (University of Manitoba)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Glen Coulthard (University of British Columbia)

Missing Children: Centring Childhood and the Intergenerational Transmission of Coloniality: Toby Rollo (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: It is central to the maintenance of colonialism and its cognate structures that every generation is socialized through interpersonal violence into a prevailing civilizational order. Violence is endemic in the process by which some children are taught to dehumanize others as initiation into a dominant community while other children are taught to dehumanize themselves as initiation into a marginalized community. I argue in this paper that the intergenerational process of normalizing civilizational violence situates childhood as the originary site of colonial reproduction and, therefore, as a site of emancipatory refusal and resistance where a radical break with coloniality can be initiated. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, the child is absent from contemporary decolonial discourse and literature. Childhood agency and experience are almost uniformly transposed through one or more of the triumvirate logics of race, class, and gender, where coloniality is framed as a problem of symbolic relations or ideology that can only be effectively addressed through critical intellectual and organizational work of adults. Theoretical contributions to liberatory resistance and resurgence tend to privilege able-bodied adults as both subject and audience (erasing not only children but those with severe cognitive disabilities). I argue that recognizing the centrality of intergenerational violence to the reproduction of coloniality enjoins us to treat childhood as a central and constitutive feature of decolonial analysis along side race, class, and gender. Initially, this will require theorists to engage with disciplines that have been largely ignored such as critical childhood studies.

Resistance and the Limits of an Inclusion Framework: Anna Drake (University of Waterloo)
Abstract: In recent years deliberative democrats have attempted to extend meaningful participation to activists through their inclusion in a broader “deliberative system.” Instead of very limited inclusion—or outright exclusion—from deliberative processes, deliberative systems incorporate both traditionally deliberative and decision-making components alongside messier democratic and sometimes “unreasonable” components with the hope that all components, even those that resist and even reject deliberative norms and processes, will contribute to the overall health of deliberative democracy. In the context of the contributions and limitations of this approach I ask whether deliberative systems are compatible with resistance. Key to my critique are the power asymmetries in deliberative systems (where the traditionally deliberative and decision-making components draw from the contributions of democratic/activist components to enhance their version of deliberative inclusion). Ultimately, I argue an inclusion framework cannot handle sustained and substantive engagement with activists and marginalized communities and the deliberative system fails to be truly inclusive. I then ask whether, and how, deliberative democracy can take activism and resistance seriously. Operating against a deliberative systems background there are two ways to resist: internally, by enhancing the power of these “messier” components; and externally, by rejecting the deliberative system’s effective control over who gets to speak and how. Focussing on external resistance I look at ways activists resist and I emphasize the need to make sustained engagement with activists a normative requirement for deliberative democrats—shifting the burden for deliberative “failures” from activists and marginalized communities and onto deliberative democrats.

Missing Dissident Citizens: The Securitization of Resistance: Nisha Nath (University of Alberta)
Abstract: In this paper, I respond to a lacuna in current Canadian citizenship scholarship which has paid very little attention to the role of dissent and dissidence in democratic life. I examine the relationship between discourses of liberal recognition and inclusion (human rights) and critical discourses of dissidence and anti-oppression. Grounding my theoretical framework in Rita Dhamoon’s (2013) challenges to the politics of inclusion and Holloway Sparks’ (1997, 2016) figure of the dissident citizen, I will contextualize this work within critical citizenship scholarship and in particular Lee’s notion of the “third space of citizenship” (2010), as well as in Indigenous decolonial scholarship, specifically Coulthard’s (2014) challenge to the politics of recognition and Simpson’s (2014) elaboration of a politics of refusal. I will apply this theoretical framework to examine concerns raised about the impact of Bill C-51 on dissent, focusing specifically on which justice assertions are legitimized through human rights discourse, and which assertions are treated as threats. This work is situated within a larger project that examines the human rights framing of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). In this project I ask, given the changing role of museums as emerging sites of social activism, the CMHR’s own mandate to take action against hate and oppression, as well as the importance of contending with ongoing legacies of trauma and violence, what are the limits and possibilities of the CMHR’s human rights frame for countering oppression?